Solis: I really wish I had been able to pass those spectacularly obtrusive farm-labor regulations, darn it

posted at 8:14 pm on January 28, 2013 by Erika Johnsen

Via the WFB, there is so much wrong with the bureaucratic attitude perfectly encapsulated by just this short clip, I hardly even know where to begin.

MARTIN: What – some of the things that jumped out that you said, “Man! I have four years, but I still wish I had more time to do,” that was really important to you.

SOLIS: I’ll tell you one of the things that has been an obstacle is trying to get our regulations through, and a lot of it has to do with the lobbying groups, or the folks that are opposed to some of the reforms that we wanted to see happen to protect children in farm labor – which, to me, makes so much sense; trying to protect workers in hazardous conditions, really trying to go after those bad employers that really put people in harm’s way and don’t care about – they game the system. They don’t care about making reforms or making it safe for their people to not get injured or be killed. I mean [the] construction industry, coalmine industry.

There’re a lot of areas that we want to work with people, but please don’t just come out thinking that all we want to do is destroy the economy because we’re asking for enforcement. These are the laws. Nobody came here to create new laws, necessarily. We want to implement the laws that are currently on the book and refine them, and you do it through regulation.

Firstly, the reforms that “happen to protect children in farm labor” to which Solis is referring? Of course folks were violently opposed to those proposals, seeing as how they would have completely upended the economies of rural communities and family farms and deprived many young people of valuable skill-building after-school employment opportunities. Paul Schwennesen thoroughly broke down this outrageous overstep at the time it was first pushed:

According to the proposed rules, it’s okay to hire the 15-year-old neighbor kid as long as he doesn’t:-Work on a roof, scaffold, or anything more than 6 feet high

-Operate any power driven machine (unless he’s enrolled in a state-sanctioned vocational education class and has proper certifications and has passed documented and filed written exams)

-Drive my tractor

-Hook my tractor up to any implement

-Ride as a passenger in my tractor (unless equipped with seatbelt and separate passenger seat)

-Work in my corral with any un-castrated male livestock older than six months

-Cut down trees (of any diameter)

-Attend a livestock auction

-Move meat in and out of our freezers …

Maybe I’m cranky, but that pretty well puts him out of commission as far as my business is concerned. …

Folks, this is absurdly, radically out of control. Can you imagine Abraham Lincoln coming of age under the paternalist aegis of the Department of Labor? Do we think for one moment that NIOSH standards allow for rail-splitting? George Washington might have felled a cherry tree, but his employer would have paid handsomely for the infraction under the Fair Labor and Standards Act. The young Thomas Jefferson would have been kept safely out of harm’s way under Hazardous Operation 13, which precludes anyone under sixteen from “planting, cultivating, topping, harvesting, baling, barning, and curing of tobacco.”

Secondly, what is Secretary Solis implying about the farming industry, and physical-labor based jobs in general? That it’s full of “bad employers” who are actively apathetic about putting people’s in harm’s unadulterated way and don’t care about people being killed? What is this, communist China? We do indeed already have laws on the books about that, and a fully functioning (some might say, overly functioning) judicial system in which people can air and address their grievances.

Thirdly, “nobody wants to create new laws,” just further refine their enforcement through regulation? Quite the creative take on boundless bureaucratic authority you’ve got there.

The number of Americans not participating in the labor force has increased by over 8 million people since the start of the Obama presidency, and the Obama administration has been rolling out new-and-improved regulations at an impressively zealous rate — and Secretary Solis is suggesting that people putting up a fight against still more oh-so-magnanimous, top-down regulations has been a major problem?

Secretary Solis is on her way out of the Labor Department for Obama’s second term — but I think that waiting to see who the president picks as her replacement might make me even more nervous than the alternative.

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Helped milk cows, feed orphan calves, slopped hogs, cleaned out stables, tossed a few haybales around, fed chickens, collected eggs,
worked the veg garden, heck I even helped to clean out the milking shed! Those who know know what I mean lol. Washed cows udders, carted cow feed, the best thing of all tho was being able to watch a mare foal… I’ll never forget that in a million years!!

Also remember the Inheritance tax, it’s gonna wipe out farms also, let alone all the other cr*p that is being thrown their way.

Scrumpy on January 28, 2013 at 8:41 PM

Yep.

There is only one reason why the economy doesn’t improve: Obama doesn’t want it to. Bad economy=more dependence=more democrat power. He especially is going to go ALL OUT to kill the economy now that he’s past his “last” election.

And he is. If he, as I expect, chooses to stay on past 2016 I doubt there is an election. Especially with how gutless the Republicans are. He’ll just say “Let me be clear, I won… twice already…”

The most dangerous people in the world are not the smart, successful, it’s the stupid people, people too stupid to know that they are stupid…Solis is one of those people, degrees? I am sure, but I am talking about just plain common sense in being smart…not brilliantly stupid.

Man do I loathe these idiots. Just go away and leave people to live their lives free from you and your regulations. Jeeze you’d think they’d get tired of fluking with people all the time.

D-fusit on January 28, 2013 at 8:47 PM

Leaving people alone is anathema to liberals.

They simply cannot allow you to be left alone. After all, to them, it is WE who are the stupid people, we can’t have freedom. Why, we might choose to drink 20oz Cokes or something else “our betters” KNOW is bad for us!

This is why we will be better off post-collapse when there won’t be any government schools. Kids will get a far better education from the hard life that will ensue post welfare state than in the “finest” of today’s government schools.

Well, personally, I’m kind of upset that she’s leaving. I soooo wanted her to win her War on Dust.

Resist We Much on January 28, 2013 at 8:51 PM

Actually, I think that one is still in play. Spent some time working with my father in law last week getting ready for a “particulate management specialist” to come advise him on how to reduce dust on our farms and in the orchards…… Even though he farms in a river basin, it is edged by a huge desert region. Brown out dust storms are routine around here anytime the winds get up over 15mph – 90mph are not unusual.

Scrupy, you need to take vacation around ‘Haying season’ and spend time on as any of the machines as they will let you. Nothing cooler than driving the baler and watching the redtail hawks waiting for you to scare up lunch. Country boy dreamin again I am

Child labor… Pfffft! I spent a lot of late summer’s as a young teen on a farm some close friends had moved to. I made pretty good money bailing hay, slopping pigs, helping butcher a cow or two. Occasionally on the weekends we’d sneak off with some moonshine (the real stuff) from the liquor cabinet. I Learned to drive trucks and tractors and met a lot of pretty farm girls. It wasn’t child labor… it was some of the best days of my life as a kid.

So very true! Worse, they tend to be more messed up than their clients.

Liam on January 28, 2013 at 9:02 PM

I took Psych 101 when in college. The main thing I learned from that class is that the founder of psychology, Sigmund Freud was CLEARLY insane. It’s like basing a science off the madness in an Edgar Allen Poe story like “Masque of the Red Death” or something.

I took Psych 101 when in college. The main thing I learned from that class is that the founder of psychology, Sigmund Freud was CLEARLY insane. It’s like basing a science off the madness in an Edgar Allen Poe story like “Masque of the Red Death” or something.

wildcat72 on January 28, 2013 at 9:06 PM

I had a few psych courses in both college and high school. The screwiest people I ever met were psych students. Madness I can deal with; you know a mentally ill person when you see one and can get him/her help.

It’s the neurotic ones that are most dangerous to the peace. They keep seeking to draw others into their disturbed view of reality, as they try to ‘find’ themselves.

^This, once you get past the smell of smelling like a farm, and over the look people give you when you walk past them because you smell like one LOL.
Do do have to say having a bull in with the cows makes it much more intresting. One thing I learned if I ever took anything away from working on a farm is that you run at the charging bull if there is no quick safe way out. Screaming and yelling while your running at him seems to make him think your not afraid of him. Worked for me “most” of the time.

Because thes “idiots” control the the “Idiots” who educate our nation.

Rio Linda Refugee on January 28, 2013 at 9:09 PM

November 2012 will go down in history as the day the parasite gained supremacy over the producer and the ability to vote themselves as a majority whatever they want from the public treasury with impunity.

Our fate is sealed, the Republic has already collapsed (it collapsed that day) we are just waiting for the remaining fiction to collapse with it. Which is now inevitable.

Now that producing is less profitable than looting you will get less producing and more looting.

Since the “rich” do not possess enough to feed the leviathan and the middle class is collapsing into part of the dependent class it can’t last much longer.

All it’s going to take for it to all fall down is for enough people to realize that the Dollar is already worthless and it ceases to be of meaningful value in exchange for goods or labor.

Oh and by the way; I am sick to friggin death of the “liited edition T-shirt” that has been a “limited edition” for 2 frigin years now. Come up with a new marketing hook to buy Townhall, obviously the current scheme ain’t workin’.

Lol! Well I don’t know about that, but it is very utilitarian. ; ) Does a nice load of work for me. Can pull the hinges off the gates of HeII. I use it mainly for scraping the lane and lifting very heavy objects.

Down on the farm we had a Hereford Bull named Charley, it was his job to bring the cows in for milking, he was tame as could be, I used to ride him!! No joke, I swear!

Scrumpy on January 28, 2013 at 9:16 PM

Herefords are reasonably docile. Holstein bulls are downright demonic. Dad had a dairy while I was young. He would not keep a bull, he used artificial insemination because the live bulls were too dangerous to keep around.

Solis, like most libs, lives in a world where food items “magically” appear on their grocery shelves. I’d also imagine that they think those steers and chickens committed suicide.

GarandFan on January 28, 2013 at 8:30 PM

No, silly. The cows and chickens perform a ritual called ‘hurvy scurvy’, I think. And leprechauns make our cereals, elves make our cookies and Skittles are of course unicorn droppings. I mean how else do you think stuff gets into the grocery stores? Gypsies deliver it every night, of course. Oh, and chocolate comes from the Eastern Bunny (I think it’s Eastern, I never understood what ‘Easter’ meant; that’s just stupid). I know this stuff because I saw it on TV.

In what is being hailed by many farm state members of Congress as well as farm lobby groups, the U.S. Department of Labor April 26 issued a statement withdrawing a proposed rule dealing with children.

The statement read:

“The Obama administration is firmly committed to promoting family farmers and respecting the rural way of life, especially the role that parents and other family members play in passing those traditions down through the generations. The Obama administration is also deeply committed to listening and responding to what Americans across the country have to say about proposed rules and regulations.

“As a result, the Department of Labor is announcing today the withdrawal of the proposed rule dealing with children under the age of 16 who work in agricultural vocations.”

“To be clear, this regulation will not be pursued for the duration of the Obama administration,” the statement concluded. “Instead, the Departments of Labor and Agriculture will work with rural stakeholders–such as the American Farm Bureau Federation, the National Farmers Union, the Future Farmers of America, and 4-H–to develop an educational program to reduce accidents to young workers and promote safer agricultural working practices.”

Among those hailing the DOL’s decision to back off on the proposal was Sen. Jerry Moran, R-KS.

“American farmers and ranchers received some unexpected and welcome news this evening: The Department of Labor finally listened to them and withdrew its proposed youth farm labor rule, which would have fundamentally altered the future of agriculture in our country,” Moran said in a conference call with agricultural journalists April 27. “If the department had moved forward with regulating the relationship between parents and children on their own farm, a dangerous precedent would have been set; virtually nothing would be off limits when it comes to government intrusion into our lives.

“For generations, the contributions of young people have helped family farm and ranch operations survive and prosper. If this proposal had gone into effect, not only would the shrinking rural workforce have been further reduced, and our nation’s youth deprived of valuable career training opportunities, but a way of life would have begun to disappear. This is a tremendous victory for farmers and ranchers across the country.”

The withdrawal statement contrasts starkly with Labor Secretary Hilda Solis’s forward to the 2012 Blueprint for Protecting Children in Agriculture, published in April by the National Children’s Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety, in which she backed the proposed rule.(More…)

There’s so much I could say here, being in the ranching biz here in SW ND.
But even tho this woman’s leaving, the Federal Govt is working in other ways to destroy farming & ranching.

Also remember the Inheritance tax, it’s gonna wipe out farms also, let alone all the other cr*p that is being thrown their way.

Scrumpy on January 28, 2013 at 8:41 PM

There’s ways to get around it, but it involves tax layers & accountants & hiding crap in creative ways.
The best way to deal with it is to never expand to the point you have to pay them.
We expanded once & then the drought came & we shrank.
The Federal govt is freezing us out bcs we have to compete with farm payments for available land around here.
You cannot believe what farmers are digging up around here & planting.
They are going insane. No AUM leases around here.
You have to pay crop prices for PASTURE.
So we can’t really afford to expand anymore.
And we in farming & ranching can’t find anyone who’s willing to work anyway.
We’ve even had to use Nord forks at our brandings bcs we can’t find any HS kids to wrestle calves.
NO ONE WANTS TO WORK ANYMORE.
We’ve even been contacted by NRCS & Fish & Wildlife to see how our operation winters our cows bcs we live on the Cannonball river.
I thank God it’s not a special river bcs they would regulate us out of business.
Hell, we can’t keep fuel on the place anymore bcs you’ve got to build a containment thing for it. That’s $$ we don’t have.
I bet they’d look at our JD’s on the place & the EPA would shut us down for them.
$hit in my corral sometimes runs to the river OMGOMGOMG!!!
Our operation is half the size it was a few years back, but they’d still zing us somewhere I’m sure.
Sometimes Hubby & I dream of just selling out & taking just a 100 cows up to some mountains where nobody cares & running them there til we die.
But I’m afraid that might be CANADA.

I grew up on a farm in Iowa and I have to wonder if Solis has ever been on a farm longer than it took to get a photo op. With the exception of attending an auction and moving meat into and out of a freezer, the rest of those things ‘regulated’ I did every day from about age 9 on. And just to put her mind at ease – I fell off a few ladders, got run over by a couple of ‘mature’ uncastrated male animals and dropped a few wagon hitches on my toes yet never had a broken bone and still have all of my digits intact.

If I were still young and my dad was still farming, and, as he often did, asked me ‘to go get me that tool over there’ – I would likely make a beeline for Solis.

They’re supposed to be hiring illegal (but soon to be legal) Mexicans to do those jobs!!!

rockmom on January 29, 2013 at 9:52 AM

It’s why the dairy farm just north of Bismarck ND on HWY 21 was responsible for causing the St Anthony elementary school to close prematurely.
Their illegal alien laborers they hired had kids who went to the school, which then caused St Anthony to have to hire an interpreter bcs they couldn’t speak English.
It was a really small school that could not afford to do such things.

See what illegal aliens do to this country?
There are literally a gazillon more stories people could tell.